Executive Committee
TOS President
Elizabeth Parks, PhD, FTOS
Dr. Elizabeth Parks received her PhD from the University of California, Davis in the Department of Nutrition and she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Berkeley. She has held academic positions at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, within the Medical School, at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She also serves as associate director of the Clinical Research Center in the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science.
The major research contributions of Dr. Parks’ lab emanate from her development of new techniques for use in animal models and in humans to discover how obesity alters the metabolism of food to lead to disease. Dr. Parks’ lab was the first to investigate the transition from fasting to feeding to uncover how dietary carbohydrate contributes to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
TOS President-Elect
Jamy Ard, MD, FTOS
Dr. Ard is professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention in the Division of Public Health Sciences, co-director of the Weight Management Center and medical director of medical weight management at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC.
In October 2021, Ard was elected as a member to the National Academy of Medicine. Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.
Ard conducts research in clinical strategies to treat obesity and associated risk-factor modification. He also focuses on health disparities and ways to better engage African Americans in effective obesity treatment and research programs. Ard is a graduate of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, where he earned his medical degree. He also holds a bachelor’s of science degree in biology from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA.
TOS Vice President
Alison Field, ScD, FTOS
Dr. Field is a Professor of Epidemiology and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Brown University School of Public Health and previously served as Chair of Epidemiology. Before joining the faculty at Brown in 2015, Dr. Field was a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
She is a public health researcher specializing in nutritional, pediatric, and psychiatric epidemiology. Her research focuses on determining the optimal classification for eating disorders and identifying the modifiable causes, correlates, consequences, and course of overweight and eating disorders among children, adolescents, and adult women. Dr. Field’s research portfolio looks at the causes and consequences of weight gain, obesity, and disordered eating and identifying obesity phenotypes. She is a co-founder and former Co-Director of the Growing Up Today Study, a cohort of more than 20,000 youth throughout the United States. Much of her research, including a current R01, uses the data.
Dr. Field holds a ScD in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
TOS Immediate Past President
Dan Bessesen, MD, FTOS
Dr. Dan Bessesen is professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes at the University of Colorado, School of Medicine (UCSOM). He is also director of the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center on the campus of UCSOM, the associate director of the Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center, and holds the Anschutz Foundation Endowed Chair in Health and Wellness.
Dr. Bessesen has conducted research funded by the National Institutes of Health into nutrient metabolism and the regulation of body weight, and has also researched the care of patients with obesity. He has been a member of TOS since 1995 and has served on multiple committees and in many leadership positions. Dr. Bessesen holds a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University and received his MD degree from the University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center.
TOS Secretary/Treasurer
Diana Thomas, PhD, FTOS
Dr. Thomas is currently a professor of discipline at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She holds joint research appointments at the Columbia University New York Obesity Research Center and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and serves on the Editorial Boards for the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, PLOS ONE, and Nutrition & Diabetes.
Mathematical modeling aggregates scientific knowledge to describe a cohesive and logical story. As a result, her modeling research has brought together collaborations across many diverse areas such as human body weight regulation, identification of risk for poor pregnancy outcomes, forecasts of obesity prevalence, prediction of changes in body composition and body fat deposition, description of eating rates, prediction of the impact of diabetes regulating medications, and classification human body geometry
Dr. Thomas holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Governing Board
Ellen A. Schur MD, MS
University of Washington
Governing Board: Clinical Practice
2020-2023
Michelle Cardel, PhD, FTOS
WW International Inc. and University of Florida
Governing Board: Population/Epidemiology
/Community
2023-2025
Marian Tanofsky-Kraff, PhD, FTOS
Uniformed Services University
Governing Board: At-Large
2020-2023
Jaime Almandoz, MD, FTOS
UT Southwestern University
Governing Board: At-Large
2022-2024
Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, FTOS
Harvard Medical School
Governing Board: Advocacy/Public Affairs/Regulatory
2022-2024
Molly Bray, PhD, FTOS
University of Texas at Austin
Governing Board: At-Large
2022-2024
Edna Nava-González, PhD
Autonomous University of Nuevo León
Governing Board: At-Large-Mexico
2020-2023
Jeffrey Zigman, MD, PhD, FTOS
UT Southwestern University
Governing Board: Basic/Experimental/Preclinical
2022-2024
Ania Jastreboff, MD, PhD
Yale University
Governing Board: Clinical Research
2023-2025
Sean Wharton, MD, PharmD
Wharton Medical Clinical
Governing Board: At-Large-Canada, 2022-2024